Conceptual carbon-reduction process design and quantitative sustainable assessment for concentrating high purity ethylene from wasted refinery gas

The direct emission of waste refinery gas after combustion will cause a severe greenhouse effect.Recovering high-value-added ethylene from wasted refinery gas has fundamental economic and environmental significance. Due to the complexity of the composition of refinery waste gas, designing and optimizing the whole recovery process is still a challenging task. Herein, a novel process(SCOAS) was proposed to obtain polymer-grade ethylene from wasted refinery gas through a direct separation process,and heat pump-assisted thermal integration optimization(HPSCOAS) was carried out. The unique feature of the novel approach is that a new stripper and ethylene reabsorber follow the dry gas absorber to ensure ethylene recovery and methane content. An industrial model, shallow cooling oil absorption(SCOA), and concentration combined cold separation system of ethylene unit using wasted refinery gas was established to analyze the technology and environment. Based on the detailed process modeling and simulation results, the quantitative sustainability assessment of economy and environment based on product life cycle process is carried out. The results show that compared with the traditional process when the same product is obtained, the total annual cost of the HPSCOAS process is the lowest, which is 15.4% lower than that of the SCOA process and 6.1% lower than that of the SCOAS process. In addition,compared with the SCOA process and the HPSCOAS process, the SCOAS process has more environmental advantages. The non-renewable energy consumed by SCOAS is reduced by about 24.8% and 6.1%, respectively. The CO_(2) equivalent is reduced by about 38.6% and 23.7%.

Environmental impacts of a large-scale incinerator with mixed MSW of high water content from a LCA perspective

Large-scale incinerators are applied widely as a result of the heavy burden of municipal solid waste（MSW） generated, while strong opposition is arising from the public living nearby. A large-scale working incineration plant of 1500 ton/day was chosen for evaluation using life cycle assessment. It was found that the corresponding human toxicity impacts via soil（HTs）, human toxicity impacts via water（HTw） and human toxicity impacts via air（HTa）categories are 0.213, 2.171, and 0.012 personal equivalents（PE）, and global warming（GW100）and nutrient enrichment（NE） impacts are 0.002 and 0.001 PE per ton of waste burned for this plant. Heavy metals in flue gas, such as Hg and Pb, are the two dominant contributors to the toxicity impact categories, and energy recovery could reduce the GW100 and NE greatly. The corresponding HTs, HTw and HTa decrease to 0.087, 0.911 and 0.008 PE, and GW100 turns into savings of- 0.007 PE due to the increase of the heating value from 3935 to5811 k J/kg, if a trommel screener of 40 mm mesh size is used to pre-separate MSW. MSW sorting and the reduction of water content by physical pressure might be two promising pre-treatment methods to improve the combustion performance, and the application of stricter standards for leachate discharge and the flue gas purification process are two critical factors for improvement of the environmental profile identified in this work.